{ "id": "2004-june-scholarship-program-takes-from-the-poor", "slug": "2004-june-scholarship-program-takes-from-the-poor", "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2004-june-scholarship-program-takes-from-the-poor.html", "year": 2004, "month": "June", "monthNum": 6, "headline": "Scholarship program takes from the poor", "kicker": "EDUCATION", "author_name": "Maurice Tamman", "author_title": "Reporter", "affiliation": "The Atlanta Journal-Constitution", "summary": "Georgia's HOPE scholarship program, funded by lottery revenues, has distributed $2.1 billion to 700,000 students but faces financial sustainability challenges and criticism for disproportionately benefiting wealthy, white communities while being subsidized by lottery players in poor and minority neighborhoods.", "keywords": [ "lottery", "scholarship", "inequality" ], "topics": [ "Education", "Data & Databases", "Investigative Methods" ], "technologies": [], "full_text": "Georgia's lottery and HOPE college scholarship program recently cel- ebrated its 10th birthday. Until recently, pols have been able to sing its praises by noting that 700,000 Georgians have had their college education funded by the programs and that HOPE has dis- tributed about $2.1 billion. In a recent Journal-ConstitutionlZogby America poll, nine out of 10 Georgians applauded, saying HOPE is a good use of lottery dollars. Despite all the adulation, elected state leaders are faced with the reality that without changes to the HOPE pro- gram, the cash paid out to Georgia's college students will likely outstrip lot- tery sales as soon as 2007. After the spring legislative session, Gov. Sonny Perdue signed a budget that froze the money students can get from HOPE and tightened how the 3.0 grade point average is calculated. The budget also limited the number of credit hours for which technical school students can receive HOPE money. But, for the first time, part- time private college students would be eligible for the scholarship. Wholesale changes to the program, however, could be treacherous. The HOPE program most benefits those in politically powerful and wealthy com- munities, usually with the best high schools. In many ways the program had become an entitlement for middle- and upper-class, largely white, Georgians. The challenge for the newspaper in examining the HOPE program was to find data that would measure the pro- grams' successes and shortcomings. These, however, are not heady days for public data-gatherers. State edu- cation bureaucrats and lottery officials refused to share any individual student financial and academic information or store lottery sales and winner data. As a result, we were forced to employ the \"dead flesh\" method made famous by Victor Frankenstein when building his monster. When we were done, however, we had documented issues many would have preferred the villagers not gaze upon: The HOPE programs are largely sub- sidized by lottery players living in pre- dominately black and poor ZIP codes. HOPE scholarships were awarded in the highest numbers in wealthier, white ZIP codes. Some proposed changes to the HOPE program likely will result in fewer poor and minority students qualifying for the scholarship. Some high schools had lowered stan- dards so more students initially quali- fied for HOPE but were entirely unpre- pared for college academics. Less than 40 percent of students could keep their HOPE scholarships past their freshman year. (Generally, a B average qualifies a student for a scholarship.) Many of the students who received HOPE would have gone to college re- gardless of the scholarship. And a ma- jority of HOPE scholars at several of the state's largest universities came from families with income exponentially higher than the cutoff for federal needs- based assistance. The paper's director of computer-as- sisted reporting, David A. Milliron, and I split the universe in half. He focused on academic issues, such as grade in- flation and how proposed changes to HOPE would alter who qualified as a HOPE scholar. I focused on the eco- nomics and social cost of HOPE and the lottery. The lottery folks gave us data for ticket sales and winners of amounts over $600 aggregated by ZIP code and year since the lottery began. We would have preferred the lottery data by store and winner, but the legislature specifically exempted the lottery from the state open records law. Having the winners data, however, proved to be critical. We had looked at the sales data in the past and it was impossible to know if sales were driven by those living in a ZIP code or those driving into or through a ZIP code. (ZIP codes on interstates and major road- ways, especially those near the state line tended to have disproportionately higher sales.) Given the millions of tickets sold, the number of winners in each ZIP code seemed to be a fair predictor of how popular the lottery was there. We married that data with the HOPE awards aggregated by ZIP code from the Georgia Student Finance Commis- sion and Census demographic data, What we found, unsurprisingly per- haps, is that ZIP codes with the high- est number of lottery winners had rela- tively few HOPE scholars while those with highest number of HOPE schol- ars had relatively few lottery winners. The lottery-winning ZIP codes were poor, largely black; the HOPE schol- arship ZIP codes were significantly wealthier and predominately white. Consider this: The ZIP code with the most lottery win- ners was 7 percent white, 87 percent black, and 6 percent other. Median household income was $36,000 in 2000. The state paid out $1.3 million in lottery winnings. There were 369 HOPE schol- arships totaling about $900,000. The ZIP code with the most scholarship recipients was 79 percent white, 8 per- cent black, and 13 percent other. Me- dian household income was $71,000 in 2000. The state paid out $391,000 in lot- tery winnings. There were 1,331 HOPE scholarships totaling $3,850,094. This income redistribution was best il- lustrated by a University of Georgia student working at an Athens, Ga., convenience store. Reporter Matt Kempner wrote: The 25- year-old economics major says the scholarship money he got for four years was nice, but it had little to do with his decision to go to college. \"All the time, moms come in and cash their welfare and child support checks and buy tickets,\" he says. \"Bums hand me a quarter, three dimes, a handful of pennies, whatever they've got on them so they can play. They're just buying a dream.\" [The student] says he feels bad for the players and tries to make sure they know they're appreciated. \"I look them in the eye and tell them thanks for paying my tuition.\" Some teachers and educational profes- sionals questioned the basic qualifica- tion for a HOPE scholarship - a B aver- -especially for incoming freshman. Once again, examining this with data wasn't easy since the state doesn't re- lease student level grade data. Instead, Milliron looked at aggregate grade results and post-secondary data compiled by the school systems, the College Board, the Board of Regents and Georgia col- leges and universities. At Cobb County's Walton High School and DeKalb County's Towers High School, the average GPA for students headed to state public colleges in 2000 was a B, reporter Patti Ghezzi reported. Walton, however, averaged 1117 on the SATs in 2000 com- pared to 833 at Towers. Perhaps predictably, we found Walton graduates had an average GPA of 2.9 at the end of their freshman year. Tow- ers graduates, however, had an aver- age GPA of 2.2. Clearly, some school systems were softer than others. Looking at data col- lected at the college level, we found a disproportionate number of DeKalb graduates who needed remedial work in college. For example, at Lithonia High School in Gwinnett County, 41 percent of graduates who landed at in-state public colleges in fall 2001 needed re- medial courses. Yet two-thirds of the graduating class had high enough grades to qualify for HOPE. One of the proposals now being con- sidered to restrict HOPE is connecting HOPE scholarships to SAT scores. By looking at data from a number of metro Atlanta school districts, however, Milliron was able to show that doing so would disproportionately affect poor, often black students. For instance, 53 percent of DeKalb County graduates reportedly earned a B average in 2002 and thus were eligible for HOPE. But Milliron's analysis showed that if the state were to require a mini- mum 1000 on the SAT, nearly 48.2 per- cent of the minority graduates in DeKalb would be ineligible for HOPE in a school district that is 90 percent minority. Unfortunately, it is impossible to know the race of HOPE recipients because no one collects that data. In fact, most colleges and universities stopped collecting students' family in- come information in recent years. (A federal financial aid form is not needed for HOPE applicants.) For those that did have data, the State Board of Regents, which oversees the state public university system, directed the schools not to give out individual student records, even if they scrubbed the data to completely obscure stu- dents' identities. We battled with the board over this is- sue early in project. Like petrified vil- lagers, however, the board armed themselves and the targeted schools with the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and refused to budge. So we focused on three fairly represen- tative institutions. We asked them to look at the data from the last year they collected income data and aggregate the number of students based on ranges of family income that we defined and the average income in each range. (Almost all schools had stopped collect- ing this data earlier this decade.) We found what the ZIP code analysis had suggested: HOPE scholars tended to come from higher income families. During the 1999-2000 school year at Georgia Southern University, for example, HOPE scholars' family income averaged $67,000, about $25,000 more than the state's median income that year and $10,000 more than students who didn't qualify for HOPE; 46 Georgia Southern Hope scholars' families earned more than $250,000 a year, averaging $453,000. Further, using data from the Georgia Financial Aid Commission we were able to determine that three-quarters of HOPE scholars come from families who either have incomes too high to qualify for federal needs-based aid program or who don't bother to apply for it. The writers capably and carefully constructed project from these var- ied data elements and presented reasoned findings. Even HOPE founder and former Gov. Zell Miller could only muster this criti- cism in a letter to the editor: You fought the lottery tooth and nail from the first day I mentioned it in 1988. And now, you're going after HOPE like a vulture picking apart roadkill.\" Given Miller's choice of words, I think it's time to abandon the Frankenstein analogy before it's too late. Contact Maurice Tamman by e-mail at mtamman@ajc.com.", "provenance": { "extracted_by": "pre-v2", "extracted_at": "", "verified": true }, "similar": [ { "slug": "2000-april-playing-the-lottery", "score": 0.338 }, { "slug": "1999-may-in-memorium", "score": 0.18 }, { "slug": "2001-januaryfebruary-stories", "score": 0.173 }, { "slug": "2000-april-impact-of-choice", "score": 0.149 }, { "slug": "2001-januaryfebruary-the-math-on-gambling", "score": 0.134 } ], "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2004-june-scholarship-program-takes-from-the-poor.html", "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2004-june-scholarship-program-takes-from-the-poor.json" }